OLYMPIA, Wash.  An Olympia mom wants to learn why her 10-year-old son was placed in a padded room at his elementary school last Friday.

Melissa Gum's son attends Garfield Elementary, where she acknowledges he's been to the principal's office before.

The school says he was sent to the principal's office Friday for being disruptive in class.

But Gum said hes never been sent to a room the district refers to as "the quiet room," which is described as the size of an office with gym mats padding the walls.

It gets worse, according to Gum. She said the principal forgot about her son after the end of school and she was frantically trying to find him.

The school district said the room was set up a few years ago for students with special needs. But Gum said her son is a typical 10-year-old with no diagnosed behavioral or developmental issues.

The district said the boy was acting out, but other resource rooms were unavailable, so the principal opted to place him in the quiet room. They also said the boy was released two minutes after the bell rang at the end of the school day on Friday.

LONGVIEW, Wash. — Longview Public Schools administrators call it an “isolation booth” and photos of it are creating a Facebook firestorm.

Some parents say they’re worried kids are being abused when they’re locked inside it at school.

The isolation booth has been at Mint Valley Elementary School for the past four years. That’s because the school hosts a special education program for disabled students with behavioral issues. The booth is used to calm down some of the students when they’re at risk of hurting themselves or others.

Just hours after they were posted, photos of the isolation booth were shared on Facebook about 100 times.

The pictures show that from the outside, the booth is located in a storage area and has two peepholes at different heights. Inside, students can sit on the floor of the small padded room, and the ceiling has air holes for ventilation.

The original Facebook poster, Ana Bate, a Longview mother, criticized its use as abusive, arguing children are locked in for crying or tapping on their desks.

Comments echoed by other Facebook posters like Darren Pirtle asked “seriously ... have the police been notified that this is being used??”

Marcy Brinkerhoff-Hogg wrote, “that is terrible and should NEVER be used regardless if the child is out of control or not.”

And Jena Raelyn Brown suggested, writing in all capital letters: “if a parent did that at home they would get put in jail!!!”

Bate, whose 10-year-old son is not in the special education program, told KATU News late Tuesday night that her son told her he saw several kids go in the box.

In one instance, a female aide came up behind a boy, picked him up off the floor and dropped him into the isolation box, she said. He landed on the floor and cried the entire time. In another instance a boy, who was placed inside the box for lifting up a desk, became violent while he was inside.

“My question for the school district is how is that therapeutic if not directly opposite from this supposed reinforcement they’d like everybody to believe it to be?” she said. “If they are being paid to lock people up, get extra education and work in mental health or psychiatric units, not with children that have minds that need to be explored, need to be expanded, that need to feel safe.”

But the district does not think it is abusive.

“People have their own opinions without having a lot of the information about it. I would not classify it as abusive,” said Sandy Catt, director of communications for Longview Public Schools.

Catt said the isolation booth is designed as therapy for children needing to calm down.

Of the 6,500 students in the Longview School District, only eight or nine are allowed to go inside, and that’s because the school has permission from their parents.

“It is concerning to us that there may not be a complete understanding of the situation,” Catt said.

She said some of the eight or nine kids voluntarily go inside the booth for a break from stimulation. She added when the door is locked a school staff member is outside, monitoring what happens.

Catt said the school district had never received a complaint about the isolation booth until Tuesday, and still, none of those complaints has come from parents whose students went inside.

And for those parents who object, their students would never be placed inside because the district requires parent permission. Bate told KATU News she questions parents who agree to let their kids go inside the box.

2
posted on 11/28/2012 6:53:47 PM PST
by Jack Hydrazine
(It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!)

The kid spent ONE HOUR in a small room with the door open, and his mother is ready to file suit because her bratty but “impressionable” boy was “traumatized.” Bet you there has been no dad in this picture for a good long while.

My wife tought for 40 years and now subs a bit. she was recently asked to do 6 weeks in a class of 6 “disturbed kids” 2 blacks, 2 Chicanos, and two whites. They had a “padded Cell” in the room. There were two aids, one a big guy.

These kids would become very violent, foul mouthed, and uncontrollable. My wife got kicked, hit and swore at constantly. The guy aid would put the violent kids in the padded cell, where they would scream and yell, and kick the door.

6 weeks of hell for my wife. They were all from single family situations - They all will become violent criminals and end up in jail. There is no hope for them.

Give them a call and ask what sizes they have their straight jackets in. If they don't have any just say'll you'll be glad to donate a few. Say you'll throw in a few Hannibal Lecter masks, too, so the students feel really cozy in their padded room.

10
posted on 11/28/2012 7:03:09 PM PST
by Jack Hydrazine
(It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!)

No, they expel such students and send them back to public school. Public schools are left with the ones the private schools and charter schools find too challenging.

THANK YOU !! Soon as Norm Day is over in California, they kick those little monsters out and send them back to us. Another batch comes right before standardized testing, to raise their scores (and lower ours, though I know that's not their intent.)

There is a new kind of behavior disorder, the opposite of ADHD. The kid gets over stimulated, his brain overwhelmed. Instead of a break in the synapse that needs to be jumped by the impulse, there are too many impulses jumping the synapse at the same time. If there is a misdiagnosis and medication like ritalin is prescribed, the kid just flips out.

I think that I saw this happen with a kid in my son’s class. He wasn’t permitted to attend school full time because they said that he couldn’t handle it. One time in grade school, he flipped out, ran out side and climbed the BB backstop and the school had to call the fire company to come and get him down.

In the 1950s, people didn't “mainstream” mentally disturbed children into their local public school environment.

I didn't have classmates who routinely crawled under their desks, cursed out teachers, or banged their heads against the walls. Did you?

My child had to deal with this type of unacceptable behavior everyday.

I doubt the disturbed children benefitted much from the experience. I know the “normal” children didn't gain anything constructive, other than pure disdain for their supposedly superior adult teachers, who tried to force them to pretend to tolerate abnormal behavior.

This is the result of refusing to permit schools to use corporal punishment. When you cannot swat the kid for bad behavior when small, you end up with an over-sized “time out” room with padded walls to prevent injury and a locked door to keep them in.

You described my granddaughter. It took me a long time to learn that her problems were not going to be cured with spankings. She had sensory integration problems and chaotic classrooms with lots of noise or even flickering
florescent lighting drives her crazy. And once the impulsive response begins it easily escalates to the point where someone may get hurt. The doctors tried her on ritalin and it did make her want to crawl out of her skin.

We still do not understand what is going on. It is shocking how common this is.

You described my granddaughter. It took me a long time to learn that her problems were not going to be cured with spankings. She had sensory integration problems and chaotic classrooms with lots of noise or even flickering
florescent lighting drives her crazy. And once the impulsive response begins it easily escalates to the point where someone may get hurt. The doctors tried her on ritalin and it did make her want to crawl out of her skin.

We still do not understand what is going on. It is shocking how common this is.

I remember mainstreamed kids when I was in school 40 years ago. It was taxpayer funded babysitting for the parents

All schooling is babysitting. The goal of compulsory schooling was to separate children from parents, so that the children could be molded according to the will of the elites, and so that women could be thrown into the "workforce." It's been that way from the beginning. It's nothing new.

Have you heard the term, "Carnegie Units"? The reason for the name is that Rockefeller and Carnegie spent more money on "educational research" in the early 1900s than all levels of government combined. They wanted a docile working class, and they got it, through the methodology of behavioral psychology.

Nothing proves the brilliance of their strategy than the fact that parents, who suffered through 12 mind-numbing years of school, gladly send their children off to the same fate, all the while imagining themselves to be freethinkers.

Yes, schooling works. But not in the way we've been taught to believe.

It’s called sensory processing disorder . The worst thing that a doctor can do is put her on ritalin. I think that is what the padded room is for, to calm them down. The important thing for parents and teachers to remember is that the child is not misbehaving when he has a melt down. The child is just overwhelmed and yelling at the child or trying to discipline him will only make things worse.

Time out room. Say you have a spec ed classroom with violent, explosive,(emotionally & socially disturbed kids) that are a danger to all the kids. Kids that when they get upset, attack other children, throw desks, swear, urinate in classroom and on other kids, ect ect. When they won't stop fighting and attempting to hurt other kids and teachers; they go in the time out room, (padded walls & floor). Usually they continue to kick & scream, then start swearing, then after some time start crying, then start begging the teacher to talk to them and let them be with the other kids who are terrified of the violent child. Teacher then enters room and trys to reason with the child and why they can't act in this manner.

You all should respect what many spec ed teachers go through, attempting to educate these basket case kids; we have to make a place for them to be successful in our greater society or build more prisons. Look first at the kid's family and you will see abuse, drugs, mental illness, and an environment kids should never experience. My wife has come home with black eyes, bite marks, bruises, and blk & blue marks from grade school kids. More to all of this than most believe.

The only reason that I learned about the disorder is because I was trying to help a friend of ours who was having a problem with her two year old. I told her that she needed to get better help than we have locally and found a clinic at Children’s hospital in Seattle that treated the symptoms that her son had.

Anyway, to make a long story a little shorter, this week, they found out that the child has a cyst on the brain stem that might be causing the behavior problems, but that remains to be seen. Tomorrow they have an appointment with neurologist about draining the cyst. It’s one of those situations that you don’t know which alternative is worse, the disorder or the cyst. Maybe the doctors will have some answers tomorrow.

In elementary school in the early 1960’s, I often was locked in a “quiet” room because I was frequently not the perfect little drone that incessant indoctrination required. And said room wasn’t padded, either. It was some kind of combination storage room and electrical distribution room full of large electrical distribution panels and dusty shelves full of old text books and other dusty old crap. I was frequently told when locked in said room that if my behavior didn’t improve I was likely headed to the electric chair. I suppose the electric panels were supposed to play on my imagination in combination with such admonitions.

However, I was a tough little kid, so that kind of nonsense didn’t make too much of an impression on me, even at that those tender ages, and I found the quiet storage room was actually rather pleasant compared to being in class. I had no trouble passing the time, since I merely disappeared into a delightful fantasy world of my own making.

I would have never occurred to me to complain to my parents about these punishments, since of course they would simply have added their own whippings to top off the earlier school punishments.

Ah, the days of yore of government education in the deep South in the golden olden days.

42
posted on 11/28/2012 10:13:29 PM PST
by catnipman
(Cat Nipman: Vote Republican in 2012 and only be called racist one more time!)

I appreciate that dealing with the extremes is a trial. I couldn’t do it.

My only opinion is that most of even the mildly challenged shouldn’t be mainstreamed with normal schoolchildren who have some chance of learning something useful. Kids only get one shot at an education, and anyone and anything that distracts from that should be removed, and I include discipline cases in that, too.

In our school district they now place the headbangers in with the regular kids, and of course that means a second teacher needs to be in the classroom. Parents who love their children should do whatever they have to do to keep their kids far, far away from the government schools.

My oldest boy came home from school last year absolutely mortified by the punishment the principle had handed down to him... she had made him spend his recess time in the kitchen doing dishes!

Of course, due to my son being an "impressionable young kid who watches TV", I ran straight to my lawyer because the school made him feel like "one of the help".

In reality, I called the principle and extended my appreciation for her unorthodox and VERY effective method of making sure my 7 year-old wouldn't be prone to throwing paper-wads during lunch anymore. Of course, this is what you get at a private, Christian school that not only lacks interest in seeking State accreditation, they outright shun it.

I have to tell you, when he came home that day and was telling me, in disgust, about his ordeal washing dishes at school... it was very difficult for me to not bust out laughing.

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